The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

by Paul Brunton

and let it shine in the background while you go about your daily work.

for the second exercise, in which you try to obtain an immediate identification with the Overself.

eyes. We give up our bondage to the erroneous belief in limitation.

the beauty and sublimity of the Self.

In this moment here and now, letting go of past and future, seeking the pure consciousness in itself, and not the identifications it gets mixed up with and eventually has to free itself from—in this moment he may affirm his true

While giving all attention to the Overself, or to its remembrance, or to its various aspects, or to the idea of it, he forgets himself. This makes it possible to transcend the ego.

Great stuff!

This is the wonder of the Short Path—that it teaches us to refuse at once every thought which seeks to identify us with the feeble and unworthy self.

Outstanding

If each attack of adverse force, each temptation that tries a weakness, is instantly met with the Short Path attitude, he will have an infinitely better chance of overcoming it.

On the Short Path, instead of attacking the lower self, he lifts himself up to the presence of the higher. The evil in him may then melt away of its own accord.

The more he practises identifying himself with the timeless Now (not the passing “now”), the more he works for true freedom from besetting passions and dragging attachments.

Thus, it not only comes closer to the source from which Grace is being perpetually radiated, but it also is repeatedly inviting Grace with each loving remembrance. (23-6-149)

God is in your very being. To know him as something apart or far-away in time and distance or as an object outside yourself, separate from you—that is not the Way—impossible. Jesus gave away the secret: he is within you.

Especially good

Grace, since it is nothing other than a benign force emanating from the Overself. It is always there but is prevented by the dominance of the animal nature and the ego from entering his awareness.

Such aspiration means the hunger for awareness of the Overself, the thirst for experience of the Overself, the call for union to the Overself.

Such illumined thinking is not the same as ordinary thinking. Its qualitative height and mystical depth are immensely superior. But when his thoughts can go no farther, the Overself’s Grace touches and silences them. In that moment he knows.

The Short Path offers a swifter unfoldment of the intuitional consciousness.

It seeks to identify the man now with his higher self.

an endless source of satisfaction and peace.

Short Path, where he learns to hold himself in peace and patience.

(8-1-143) There is no real ego

The ego is not really

killed—how without

body and intellect, emotion and will, could anyone act in this world?—but the centre of being is mov...

(23-8-114) Why be afraid of this declaration:

they see all as One.

One must participate in God’s work by assisting evolution and redeeming the world, not squat idly in peace alone.

can, being an efflux from the

godlike part of himself which is in its way a portion of the universal deity. If he can be sure that it is not pseudo-intuition, truth in it will lead him to life’s best, whether spiritual or worldly.

He learns to be patient, to let the higher power take its own course.

The unfulfilled future is not to be made an object of anxious thought or joyous planning. The fact that he has taken the tremendous step of offering his life in surrender to the Overself precludes it. He must now and henceforth let that future take care of itself, and await the higher will as it comes to him bit by bit. This is not to be confounded with the idle drifting, the apathetic inertia of shiftless, weak people who lack the qualities, the strength, and the ambition to cope with life successfully. The two attitudes are in opposition.

the qualities, the strength,

and the ambition to cope with life ...

The true aspirant who has made a positive turning-over of his ...

life to the care of the impersonal and higher power in whose existen...

has done so out of intelligent purpose, self-denying strength of will,...

of what constitutes happi...

It will mean freedom from the torment of not knowing what to do, for

every needed decision, every needed choice, will become plain and obvious to the mind just as the time for it nears. For the intuition will have its chance at last to supplant the ego

in such matters. He will no longer be at the mercy of the latter’s bad qualit...

philosophy understands the ego, puts it in its place, its subservient place, so that the man remains always undeserted by the pure consciousness.

The mind is drawn so deeply into itself and becomes so engrossed in itself that the outer world vanishes utterly. The sensation of being enclosed all round by a greater presence, at once protective and benevolent, is strong. There is a feeling of being completely at rest in this soothing presence. The breathing becomes very quiet and hardly perceptible. One is aware also that nourishment is being mysteriously and rhythmically drawn from the universal Life-force. Of course, there is no intellectual activity, no thinking, and no need of it. Instead, there is a k-n-o-w-i-n-g. There are no desires, no wishes, no wants. A happy peacefulness, almost verging on bliss, as human love might be without its passions and pettinesses, holds one in magical thrall. In its freedom from mental working and perturbation, from passional movement and emotional agitation, the condition bears something of infantile innocence. Hence Jesus’ saying: “Except ye become as little children ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” But essentially it is a return to a spiritual womb, to being born again into a new world of being where at the beginning he is personally as helpless, as weak, and as dependent as the physical embryo itself. (23-7-11) Everything that intrudes upon the mental stillness in this highly critical stage must be rejected, no matter how virtuous or how “spiritual” a face it puts on. Only by the lapse of all thought, by the loss of all thinking capacity can he maintain this rig...

When the personal ego’s thoughts and desires are stripped off, we behold ourselves as we were in the first state and as we shall be in the final one. We are then the Overself alone, in its Godlike solitude and stillness. (24-4-1)

arise, I lost the feeling that I was there at all. I seemed to dissolve and vanish from that place, but not from consciousness. Something was there, a presence, certainly not me, but I was fully aware of it. It seemed to be something of the highest importance, the only thing that mattered. After a few minutes I came back, discovered myself in time and space again; but a great peace had touched me and a very benevolent feeling was still with me. I looked at the trees, the shrubs, the flowers, and the grass and felt a tremendous sympathy with them and then when I thought of other persons a tremendous benevolence towards them. (22-6-80) The actual experience alone can settle this argument. This is what I found: The ego vanished; the everyday “I” which the world knew and which knew the world, was no longer there. But a new and diviner individuality appeared in its place, a consciousness which could say “I AM” and which I recognized to have been my real self all along. It was not lost, merged, or dissolved: it was fully and vividly conscious that it was a point in universal Mind and so not apart from that Mind itself. Only the lower self, the false self, was gone but that was a loss for which to be immeasurably grateful. (28-2-142) The ego totally ceases to exist and is fully absorbed into the Overself only in special, temporary, and trance-like states. At all other times, and certainly at all ordinary active and everyday times, it continues to exist. The failure to learn and u...

unity. We can neither think nor talk of this sublime state with any accuracy. Hence the only medium whereby we can properly represent it

Philosophic life is established continuously and permanently in the divine presence;

It is ordinary living, plus an extraordinary continuous awareness.

Here I stand with Chinese Zen (Ch’an), especially as I was taught and as explained by the Sixth Patriarch, Hui Neng. He warns against turning meditation into a narcotic, resulting in a pleasant passivity. He went so far as to declare: “It is quite unnecessary to stay in monasteries. Only let your mind … function in freedom … let it abide nowhere.” And in this connection he later explains: “To be free from attachment to all outer objects is true meditation. To meditate means to realize thus tranquillity of Essence of Mind.”

samadhi differs from this; it does not seek deliberately to eliminate thoughts, although that may often happen of its own accord through identification with the true Mind, but to eliminate the personal feelings usually attached to them, that is, to remain unaffected by them because of this identification. Ch’an does

It is a union of reason and intuition. It is an awakening once and for all. It is not attained

in nirvikalpa and then to be held as long as possible. It is not something, a state alternately gained and lost on numerous occasions, but gradually expanded as it is clung to. It is a single awakening that enlightens the man so that he never returns to ignorance again. He has awakened to his divine essence, his source in Mind, as an all day and every day self-identification. It has come by itself, effortlessly.